Review of Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran’s top arbitration body, the Expediency Council, viewpoints as declared in his televised interviews:

1. I am both opposed to those who try to show the situation in Iran is beyond remedy and those who want to hypnotize people by saying that there is no problem in the country. Such viewpoints harm our country.

2. People’s role in managing the country’s affairs should be restored and they should take charge of economic and cultural affairs. The government should only play its main role [as policymaker].

3. Although all three past administrations, which came and went, had differences, for example, on economic issues, they had common denominators as well. Under all those three administrations, economic growth rate was 4 percent and the country was plagued with high commodity prices and soaring inflation rate. The role of the administration should undergo a basic change, which I call “renovation of the administration.” This renovation should cover all areas of the administration’s behavior, structure, performance and management.

4. In one of the past administrations, when Iran was facing no risk of international sanctions, they closed down the doors of [the nuclear facility in] Natanz. [Under the next administration] when the country was facing threats, they said, “Iran is facing no threats,” and did not take the risk of sanctions seriously. What kind of discretion is this to be applied to the management of a country? When we must proceed with full force, we stop, and when we must be careful and avoid adventurism, we act recklessly.

5. Culture should be also changed. If the culture does not change, we would not be able to live together. Can a nation live [a comfortable life] when the leaders of the country are in discord [over various issues]? The culture of life should be first corrected among our politicians so that it can be generalized to lower layers of the society as well.

6. The first issue is development of Iran agriculture sector. Our food security should be such that every family that thinks about its future outlook for, at least, five years ahead, they would feel assured about the supply of bread and meat and this can be only done when accurate plans are made for the agriculture sector. We will allocate special subsidies to all farmers who would show the willingness to go through the transition from traditional to modern agriculture and modernize their farming and bring prosperity to agriculture sector, and we call this subsidy the “green subsidy.”

7. The next issue of concern is the issue of household businesses. I have defined special businesses for five million households; from women to students who have just graduated from universities. We will provide them with workshops inside their homes in order to use those workshops and manufacture computer parts, television sets and some other appliances that we are currently importing from Singapore, Korea, Taiwan and China, right here in our own country.

8. The next issue which we will pursue is renovation of the Iranian industries. The storming of Iran by Chinese goods [during the past years] has done serious harm [to domestic production]. We will support all kinds of businesses to the extent that they would be strengthened. I will exempt any businesses, which prove capable of renovating their machinery in a matter of three years, from all kinds of taxes, so that, Iranian goods would be able to achieve the highest possible competitive advantages for presence in international markets. If our goods are not competitive, we would not be able to progress at international level.

9. The Americans have imposed sanctions on us, on the one hand, while withholding us the time we need, on the other hand. Therefore, we must change this trend. As a result, I will take negotiations [with the P5+1 group of world powers] quite seriously and I will assign a very powerful team of experts consisting of the most seasoned Iranian diplomats to this mission and, God willing, we will resolve the country’s nuclear issue in this way.

10. I believe that we have so many major power leverages both inside and outside the country to enable us to solve our problems. As a first step, I will try to establish a union of Southwest Asian nations with the participation of all regional heads of state and I will invite all those leaders to Iran in order to establish this union because unions for promoting peace, security, and economic cooperation have been already established in Europe, Asia and many other parts of the world.